Somehow I came across a link to this one episode of a podcast called Reply All. That particular episode is about Anxiety Box, a delightfully odd project by Paul Ford. He was dealing with some pretty serious anxiety and being a nerd, decided to write a program to be anxious for him. It’s a really interesting story, and while Anxiety Box is now defunct, all the code is available so you can run your own external jerkbrain if you like.

I’m not sure what possessed them to do it, but someone wrote a micro webframework in gnu COBOL. There’s even a github repo if you’d like to run it yourself. I love how weird projects can get when programmers build something just because they can.